That time of year

Everything continues on hold. Now that I feel the time has come to get back to normality, to get on with all those chores that have had to wait until the holidays were over & it's back to business as usual, the Fox has gone down with a cold. He was grumpy Saturday evening, but by Sunday he was disappearing in a grey fug. I just hope he can get rid of it before I catch it too.

Mind you, I can't see us getting that much done regardless. There is still an ice rink outside. -14 when we last looked at the thermometer.

Still, I got on with peeling spuds & preparing some sprouts for dinner. Whatever else we do, we will have to eat. In the midst of this there was a great thump, shortly followed by another, then a third. Once I had finished, I hastily went to see what all the noise was about. The post had come. 3 thick holiday brochures, all for France. Anyone would think we like France!

This seems to be the other hazard of this time of year. Great wodges of brochures, half the time for places you're not interested in. We're still getting brochures on Canada, even though we've been & come back & are not likely to return in the immediate future. Some are for escorted tours which are just not practical in a wheelchair. Or train trips where you are permanently on the move - too exhausting! I do wish companies would just wait until you asked for a brochure, not just keep on sending it. We're still getting one brochure that was asked for by the previous occupant of this house & we've been here over 9 years! I keep thinking of all those trees cut down for brochures which will just go in the bin after barely a glance.

I tell myself I shouldn't moan too much. Our holiday in the Riviera in May is the result of one such brochure. It was sent on spec. We just flipped through & noticed this very nice looking villa. And certainly the prospect of going has helped keep our morale up through this long very chilly winter.

We even got sent a DVD for a cruise holiday this year. All that did was convince us that that was not the holiday for us. After 45 minutes watching this ship go through the Panama Canal to the West Indies, we ended up concluding one canal is just like any other, & similarly a sloth in Panama looks pretty much like a sloth in Costa Rica. And we certainly don't want to be going around with a group of 30-100 other people like a gang of school kids. There didn't seem much chance to mooch around on land by yourself.